Telecommunications equipment is inventoried for various reasons by telecommunications service providers. For example, the telecommunications equipment may be inventoried for financial reasons, such as to find capital for tax and financial services. The telecommunications equipment may also be inventoried for other reasons, such as to track part change notices to identify equipment such as plugs that have been recalled by the manufacturer. For each of these different purposes, different software may be implemented and thus may require a different file type, file format, file content and so forth.
The inventorying process is laborious. Each item to be inventoried must be manually scanned. Where inventorying is necessary for different purposes, a separate scan for each purpose is typically done with each scan producing a file type, file format, and file content that is suitable for the software that handles that purpose. Relatively large facilities such as central offices in large cities may have tens of thousands of items of equipment to be scanned. Thus, a single scan can take numerous worker-hours to complete. Therefore, scanning the inventory each time an inventory count for a different purpose is needed is a highly inefficient manner of handling the inventory tasks.